[j-nsp] Drawbacks when using QFX5100 and EX4300 in mixed VCF mode

[Kurt Bales]

The corner case for QFX3500 is that it is still the only Juniper switch
with native FC support, though most others have good FCoE transport support.

Regards,

Kurt Bales
@networkjanitor JNCIE-ENT #368



On Thu, Aug 21, 2014 at 6:07 AM, Pavel Lunin <plunin at senetsy.ru> wrote:

> 19.08.2014 19:51, Sebastian Wiesinger wrote:
> > -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> > Hardware Requirements for a Virtual Chassis Fabric
> >
> > A VCF can contain up to four devices configured as spines, and up to
> > twenty total devices.
> >
> > All spine devices must be QFX5100 devices. We recommend optimizing the
> > performance of your VCF by also configuring QFX5100 devices as your
> > leaf devices. A non-mixed VCF has the highest port density and feature
> > support for a VCF. Nevertheless, you can configure any combination of
> > QFX5100, QFX3600, QFX3500, or EX4300 devices into leaf devices within
> > your VCF.
> > -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > Any idea what they are talking about? What drawbacks does a mixed VCF
> > have in practice?
> >
> > One thing seems to be that you lose the ability to have output filters
> > on interfaces but that's all I know.
> >
>
> I guess, there is a lot of marketing here. Of course, many features are
> scaled down to the so-called "least-common denominator", as guys have
> already mentioned above. But this is quite not surprising and doesn't
> mean you must use a more featured product everywhere just because it's
> more featured.
>
> What about QFX3500, AFAIK, there's just no point to use them at all as
> from the price/performance/features perspective QFX5100 is just better
> except maybe some corner-cases (which I am not aware of). Using QFX3600
> as leafs when spines are QFX5100 is non-reasonable from the pure
> performance PoV as QFX3600 is a 40GE switch and QFX5100 is 10GE. What
> about EX4300—of course any vendor would say you better buy 10GE switches
> instead of 1GE just because 10GE switches have much more performance.
> And this is totally correct, isn't it? ;)
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